What drives differences in management?

Nicholas Bloom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Lucia Foster, Ron Jarmin, Megha Patnaik, Itay Saporta-Eksten and John van Reenen

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Partnering with the Census we implement a new survey of "structured" management practices in 32,000 US manufacturing plants. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40% of this variation across plants within the same firm. This management variation accounts for about a fifth of the spread of productivity, a similar fraction as that accounted for by R&D, and twice as much as explained by IT. We find evidence for four "drivers" of management: competition, business environment, learning spillovers and human capital. Collectively, these drivers account for about a third of the dispersion of structured management practices. Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Census Bureau. All results have been reviewed to ensure that no confidential information was disclosed.

Keywords: management; productivity; competition; learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L2 M2 O32 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-03-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-hrm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (47)

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https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1470.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: What Drives Differences in Management? (2017)
Working Paper: What Drives Differences in Management? (2017)
Working Paper: What Drives Differences in Management? (2017)
Working Paper: What Drives Differences in Management? (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1470

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